


My Traveler

by ambiguously



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alien Culture, M/M, Treat, space married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 11:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8577613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/pseuds/ambiguously
Summary: Zeb's friends don't understand.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amemait](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amemait/gifts).



It's not love.

This is hard to explain to his friends, who think the galaxy turns around on sparkly eyes and bad poetry, but most of Zeb's friends are human. This isn't the first cultural difference he's had to forgive and forget, and it definitely won't be the last. Romantic love is as foreign a concept to Lasats as sprouting wings and flying: to everyone else, it makes you look funny as you fall on your face and sprain something. Mates are... _were_...chosen as a matter of logistics. High-born families traded children's weddings to exchange property. The rest of them sorted out between themselves who would be the best fit for this one's temperament, and that one's occupation. The matches who wanted kids of their own bore lots of little Lasats, and the matches that didn't had no need. The term he remembers translates roughly into Basic as "my traveler," meaning the one who walks through the years at your side. Zeb likes the sentiment. He wonders sometimes if the Lasats on Lira San keep the same practices, if this was something handed down from ancient times. He should go visit soon. He has so many questions.

It's not sex.

He's sure he wouldn't be able to explain that to the others, either, not the way they go on. Thankfully, no one has asked. The closest has been the one time Ezra mumbled his way through half a question about Zeb being into human guys now, and his face burnt up red with embarrassment before he finished the question. Lasats have complicated mating rituals that can take up to two days to complete. Zeb has never been interested enough in the outcome to commit to that level of effort. Humans, he's learned over the years, have complicated courting rituals that end in more or less the same place every time. He's happy to lie there and watch, or to place a comforting hand against sweat-drenched skin close to the finish, but it's really not his area of expertise.

It's hard to say what this is. Zeb's not good with words, anyway.

He wants to say it's like finding yourself outside your ship in dead, freezing vacuum, certain you're about to join your ancestors, even the ancestors you didn't like much, only to suck in your last breath and find out you're alive and thriving in the cold of space. It's walking scared into a desolate place you know in your bones you should flee, and discovering that's where you belonged the whole time.

The war is over, the dead are buried, and Zeb comes home every night to his ex worst enemy because there is nowhere he belongs more than by the side of his fellow traveler.

The others don't get it. Zeb knows they don't. He doesn't mind.


End file.
